This session was a marathon 6 hour tutorial introduction to Haskell on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I’d installed the GHC beforehand and tried out a couple of ‘hello world’ style tutorials, but other than that walked in with no experience of Haskell or any other functional programming. Here are my notes: Basic Syntax make up …
Author Archives: Matt
If Code is Written Solo in a Forest, Does it Make a Sound?
I’ve written before about my views on the importance of pair programming as a way of building a common conciousness in a team. When two people work on a piece of code together, not only is it instantly reviewed for correctness and readability, but already two people on the team understand exactly why the code …
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WANTED: Software Craftsmen (and Women)
My employer, Songkick.com are hiring for developers. To join this team you must be, or believe you are capable of being, someone who creates beautiful software. Nothing less. If you think that sounds like you, do yourself a favour: stop working for those idiots who keep making you rush out all that half-arsed crap and …
Twitter me up
If you think it’s got a bit quiet here on the blog, there are two reasons for that. One: my current project is very very nearly ready for the next round of beta invites, which has keeping me extremely busy. More details on that soon. Second, though, is that I have well and truly caught …
My Real Options Story
A few weeks ago I bumped into Chris Matts and thanked him for the ‘Real Options’ session he’d lead at SPA last year. I promised write up this little story about what I took out of it. When I got back from the conference, my team were at a point where we had to chose …
Saving Bletchley Park
> Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre that helped to win the Second World War and launch the modern computer, is in danger of irreparable decay unless the Government steps in to save it. What can you do? Sign the petition Visit the campaign website Come to Extreme Tuesday Club’s next meeting to find out more.
Acceptance Tests Trump Unit Tests
At work, we have been practising something approximating Acceptance Test Driven Development now for several months. This means that pretty much every feature of the system that a user would expect to be there, has an automated test to ensure that it really is. It has given me a whole new perspective on the value …
Quick and Easy Password-less SSH Login on Remote Servers
Like so many posts in this category, this is surely child’s play to you linux aficionados. For those of us mere morals though, this is a very useful little trick, and it shows how you can easily move data from your local workstation to a remote server using SSH. If you don’t already have a …
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MagLev: Death of the Relational Database?
I just got around to watching Avi Bryant’s talk on MagLev, a new Ruby VM built on top of GemStone’s Smalltalk VM. http://www.vimeo.com/1147409 Presumably this is the kind of thing Smalltalkers have been able to do for decades, but to me the prospect of having this kind of freedom on a Ruby platform is very …
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Minesweeper Dojo
This evening I facilitated our first coding dojo at work. I’d spent some time over the holidays putting together a progression of Cucumber acceptance test cases to build up the solution, and had solved the problem once myself. I used the minesweeper kata from http://codingdojo.org/ which was a really nice easy problem for our first …